Pity it wasn’t a 64bit pci card rather than pci express… it most likely would’ve worked with his butcher job… (though most motherboards are designed so the 64bit card can fit in the 32bit slot without butchering anyway)

At first I thought he meant that he cut the heat shield down to size, and then thought perhaps it was the base of the circuit board. Then I realised that he was referring to removing the pins. the part that connect the motherboard to the daughter board. where the data goes. so he can fit it into a slot that is OBVIOUSLY the wrong standard.

I did something similar, back when I was young and foolish, though to this day I still don’t know why it didn’t work.

Here’s how I remember it: In ’94, I tried adding a CD drive to my family’s Compaq Presario (?) 486DX33. This was in the days where you still worried whether the CD drive was “Redbook” compatible and whatever.

I wanted to plug in the CD drive to the IDE bus. The computer cable only had one slot, for the hard drive, but I must’ve found a two-slot cable and plugged the CD and hard drive onto that.

The CD drive was never correctly detected along with the hard drive, whichever way I fiddled the jumpers and bios settings. It was sometimes detected, and one day I was able to transfer data from it.

It completely corrupted the hard drive contents.

To this day, I still believe the IDE interface on the Presario only supported one device. Nowadays, I wonder if the interface actually was IDE.

john either your hard drive or CDROM or m/board was stuffed (maybe you weren’t wearing an anti-static strap???) the only ide interfaces i’ve ever come across that only support one device are in RAID interfaces (which I doubt your PC had in ’94 as they were VERY expensive back then).

I think we’ve all done something stupid once before. I remember when I first got a burner I was fairly new to CDs and general and tried to use a regular pen to write on the label… it took me a few bad discs before I realized I was killing them as soon as I got done burning them.

This poor sap in the article is that the mercy of his “friend” I guarantee you that if I told a relative they needed to cut off the pins to make the card fit they would do it and wouldn’t think twice about it… that’s just MEAN.

My dad tells me of a time (back in the day) when his company just started distributed software on these “amazing, new” 3.25″, DOUBLE SIDED floppy disks.

He was sent out to provide support for someone who “couldn’t install the software from the provided disks”.

He arrives, and asks the client to demonstrate how far the install goes before stopping.

The client faithfully inserts the first disk, starts the install, reads the prompt for the next disk, takes it out, flips it, force-rams it back in again…

;)

And don’t even get me started on my friend who plugged a PCI sound card in while the computer was still running… or the guy who conveniently plugged a (stupidly designed) 12v PSU lead onto his new HD’s Master/Slave/Cable select connector. “It just happened to fit so I plugged it in. Then smoke came out.”

On that card l managed to cut the internal power path to the RAM voltage control, l wound up connecting it to the unused fan header with some wrapping wire.

The wrapping wire you see in the last photo is a repair to the differential pair, l cut through it as l was making a notch for the x1 connector.

That card has been working for months, it still is in use every day for 4-8 hours.

l don’t recommend it with an expensive card going into a PCI motherboard, but there are some motherboards with x1-x8 connectors that this may work fine on. Generally if you don’t understand connector pitch width you shouldn’t actually try anything like this.

The article does lead to posts that are readable, even if the article is a bit fail.And I must say that to my disbelieve I did meet devices in my life where they actually forgot to properly machine the parts and left holes filled or plastic attached that was suppose to be removed, and that was quite confusing.As for electronics madness, I had it several times that when I bought a product from reputable companies and looked inbetween the heatsink and the chips I found they didn’t make any contact and there was a sizeable gap (always check).